


Cordelia Versus Her Terrible Ex's Terrible Ghost

by Decoder13



Category: Battle for London in the Air (Roleplay)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Beck sucks, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 08:13:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25347520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Decoder13/pseuds/Decoder13
Summary: Cordelia is having one ofthosenights--the kind where Thaddeus Beck's ghost rises to engage in dramatic spectral whining.
Relationships: Andrew O'Rourke/Captain Cordelia French
Kudos: 4





	Cordelia Versus Her Terrible Ex's Terrible Ghost

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally written in 2018, and has not been substantially edited since. Cordelia has continued to develop since this story was written, so please take this as a sort of historical document rather than a current interpretation of the character.
> 
> Beck is still the same, though.

“Really, Thaddeus,” Cordelia said, “this is entirely unnecessary. Surely you realize that this is entirely unnecessary.”

There was no verbal response from her unexpected visitor – only deep-set, bloodshot eyes glaring back at her moodily, blue irises glowing faintly in the dark.

Cordelia sighed and drew her robe more tightly about her person. She always felt a bit uncomfortable when Thaddeus decided to invite himself into the house in the middle of the night. Inevitably, it always led to the same thing: him floating silently in the small sitting room, her staring at him blearily because it was two in the morning and she seriously doubted he’d so quickly forgotten that living people needed sleep. And he’d just sort of… hover there and gaze at her with unfathomable and unreciprocated longing until she said something. 

She’d recently made herself a very, unusually, almost uncomfortably puffy night robe specifically because of this. With a robe this cumbersome and unshapely, it’s not like there’d be anything for Thaddeus to see, anyhow. But somehow even that didn’t make things significantly less awkward.

“It’s the middle of the night,” Cordelia whispered, her voice cracking with what would probably be rage if she’d been awake enough to process the emotion fully. “The middle of the bloody night, Thaddeus! Perhaps _you_ have nothing better to do, but _I_ have to sleep.” 

Cordelia looked over her shoulder, back towards the door of her and Andrew’s room. Fortunately, as expected, she could still hear the comforting rumble of her husband’s snoring all the way from out here. He sounded like a purring, oversized cat when he snored. Lord, she loved _that_ man.

“So if you don’t have anything to say, Thaddeus,” she continued. She shrugged, then began to shift about rather conspicuously, as if to accentuate just how very ready she was to be done with this. “I don’t have any further reason to stay out he-”

“ _He’s corrupted her_ ,” Thaddeus said abruptly. 

For good measure, he somehow made every candle and lantern in the room briefly flicker to life before dissolving back into murky, familiar darkness and leaving Cordelia’s eyes almost entirely unable to see in the dark. Just wonderful. What an _endearing_ little spectral stunt. Probably he thought it was symbolic of… something.

Cordelia blinked at him a few times. She would have loved to come up with something devastatingly sarcastic to fire back at him, but all she could bring herself to muster was an exasperated, “Who?”

Thaddeus returned to staring at her silently, though somehow his staring had now intensified. As his eyes glowed in the dark, Cordelia was still able to see them despite the death blow he’d so recently struck to her night vision. At least she could know for sure that she was indeed glaring right back at him.

“ _My_ **_m u r d e r e r_** _,”_ Thaddeus rasped.

Oh, dear sweet lord. Not this. Anything but more of this.

“Dr. Jhandir,” Cordelia corrected out of sheer habit. “You’re talking about Dr. Jhandir. Again.”

“ _He MURDERED me_.”

Thaddeus’s voice was low and distant, more an echo than anything. It was heavy and cold as grave dirt, and rustled like a night wind through dead leaves, and etc. She supposed that it was everything one could want from the voice of a ghost. If one actually wanted to hear the voice of a ghost, that is.

“Because you shot him twice and showed no intention of stopping anytime soon,” Cordelia replied coolly.

“ _Your ear is by a forged process of my death rankly abused_.”

Cordelia couldn’t stifle the sigh before it escaped her lips. “Actually,” she answered, “I’d say it’s by your many very intricate processes of your death which my ear has been rankly abused.”

Beck opened his mouth to speak, but Cordelia pretended not to notice.

“I don’t care how much you hated each other,” she continued. “What did you expect a man you were actively shooting at to do? Sit down calmly on the bed and let you blow his face to pieces? Why in the name of all that is true upon this good green earth would _anyone_ do that?”

“ _A flimsy excuse for the atrocities of a man with a black stone for a heart.”_

Cordelia had to swallow down a chuckle at that. “So now his heart is black _and_ made of stone? It seems the makeup of that dastardly organ just gets more and more sinister every time you mention it.”

The glow of Thaddeus’s eyes flared from blue to a vivid amber. “ _I came here to warn you, and all you have for me is contempt."_ His eyes settled back to blue after that, but the bloodstains on his shirt and the stab wound above his left lung became faintly luminescent. “ _You’re a cruel woman, Faye._ ”

“No, Thaddeus, just a very tired one,” Cordelia replied. He seemed to have no quick reply ready for that, so she took her chance to get in the next word. “Well, if there’s something Dr. Jhandir is doing that you simply _must_ warn me about in order to speed your welcome return to your semi-eternal rest, best you get on with it now before I drift back to sleep on the spot.”

Thaddeus raised an eyebrow, and for a moment, his clear annoyance brought something very human back to his countenance. That was something Cordelia could respond to without a smirk. That was something she could almost miss. 

So of course it was gone in three seconds, vanished under 10 new layers of pompous etherealness.

“ _The man who stole my life_ ,” Thaddeus growled, “ _is at this moment stealing your sweet sister’s soul_.”

“My sister has a soul?” Cordelia asked incredulously.

The look of shock and horror on Thaddeus’s face when she said that almost made the entire disturbance worth it. Almost.

“ _Y_ _ou cannot be that same woman I so loved if you have no place in your heart even for your own sister_.”

“I love Celine very much, and you know it. But she’s about as sweet and as innocent as Attila the Hun, and possibly less.” Cordelia shrugged for maximum effect. 

Now it was Thaddeus’s turn to be at an utter loss. Most of the pomp and show slipped back away. Now, for the second time that night, he really did look like the very flawed, very disoriented man who Cordelia could feel some shred of pity for. 

All he could bring himself to stutter out was, “ _But… but they’re killing people._ ”

“Yes, Thaddeus,” Cordelia agreed with a yawn. “They’re killing people.”

“ _You_ **_k n o w_** _??_ ” The ghost’s eyes widened, and the amber light flared back up within them, but his previous air of unworldly bravado still couldn’t entirely reconstitute itself. “ _Don’t… don’t tell me they’re… they’re writing you about it_.”

He said that like he, of all people, was scandalized by the mere idea that one person could kill another person and then proficiently articulate that they had done so. It was almost funny. Cordelia supposed he hadn’t actually seen any of Celine’s paintings yet. Or maybe he had, but the sheer trauma of it all had pushed him into a state of forced amnesia. Unless maybe seeing some of them was why he was here to begin with.

“Oh, thy do more than write, Thaddeus,” she replied, face perfectly calm. “They mailed us the small intestine of a four-year-old child by mail just last week for Andrew’s birthday.”

“ _I speak only the truth, Faye. They are actually killing people._ ”

“Of course! You know, come to think of it, I do think I have the skull of some perfect young gentleman whom they dissected with a table fork lying around her somewhere. They sent it a few months back for a mantelpiece decoration. Let me just see if I can find it…” Cordelia’s eyes were used to the dark once more, or at least enough so for her to roughly navigate the sitting room in a quiet but intensely theatrical search for the alleged skull.

“ _Your sense of humor is appalling and inhumane._ ”

Cordelia looked up from the yarn basket she was now rifling through with admirable thoroughness and glanced back over her shoulder at Thaddeus. “Better than non-existent.”

“ _You… you don’t even believe that they’ve both devolved into the most appalling of murderers_.”

Cordelia rose from her crouch beside the yarn basket and turned to face Thaddeus again. “Not entirely,” she replied, “but, considering that the first words Celine ever spoke to your very dear old colleague were to ask him how to best flay a man, I can’t say I’d be surprised.”

Something somewhere in all of this was too much for Thaddeus. The candles and the lanterns roared back to life all at once. The wound above his left rib cage smoldered orange, as if it, too, were ablaze. His eyes erupted in flame. And, this time, when he spoke, he screamed.

“ ** _THEY ARE M O N S T E R S, FAYE. HOW CAN YOU LIVE WITH M O N S T E R S?”_ **

Cordelia knew immediately how she wanted to reply. She wanted to say that it was simple, really. That she hadn’t known for sure before he’d come to her – that she still didn’t know for sure, as she hardly considered him the single most reliable source of information available to her – but that she’d made her peace with a dozen suspicions years ago. That she had a family in the next room and a smuggling run early in the morning, and that she genuinely cared about both and wanted to be awake enough to enjoy both tomorrow, regardless of what judgments Thaddeus might have passed on them. She wanted to say that she could live with her beloved everyday monsters far more easily than she could live with the flame-spewing borderline poltergeist who regularly barged into her sitting room completely unbidden to shout and be shouted at and set things on fire.

But she had a certain sense that another dose of bitter humor was perhaps not the right response this time.

Instead, she smiled grimly and replied, “The same way you could live with your monsters, I suppose.”

The fires on the candles and in the lanterns dimmed.

“Not one of the people I call my friends who’s still here is _not_ a killer,” Cordelia said. “Not my sister, or her fiancé, or my brother, or my husband, or myself. Not any of my students, not any of the people I fought with or would die for. _No one_ , Thaddeus. If I locked all the monsters out of my life, I couldn’t even live with myself.” She paused. “It’s one thing we’ve had in common for a long time. It’s just that _I’ve_ learned to be live my life with it.”

The candles and the lanterns went out. Thaddeus closed his eyes and bowed his head. 

“… _My poor Faye…_ ”

Each one of those three words was enough on its own to set the whole powder keg of her exhaustion and emotion alight. The matches had been struck. Now it was Cordelia’s turn to explode.

“Faye is dead!” she spat back at him. She fixed her eyes on the mantle just to the left of Thaddeus’s face; she didn’t trust herself to look straight at him without being overcome by an uncontrollable urge to break things. “Faye was a self-pitying twit who drowned herself in indecision and misery and wrote you the most horrible, guilt-inducing note she could devise from across an ocean just so she could drag you down with her. She wanted so many things, but she was thoughtless and petty and so embarrassingly unhappy. So, if you want her, you can keep her! She’s _still_ too good for you, but she’s not good enough for me. I don’t want to drag her around with me like a boulder on my back anymore. The two of you can be dead and hate everyone together.”

Cordelia took a deep breath and bit the inside of her lip. She refocused her eyes on Thaddeus’s, but she still didn’t allow herself to truly look into them. “I _love_ my monsters. All of them. And then I look in the mirror, and I love the monster there, too. Maybe it’s wrong, but for the first time in almost four decades, I am well and truly _happy_. That’s just about enough for me.”

She paused. Part of her wanted to give Thaddeus the chance to speak. Part of her wanted to hear him rant or rave or stutter. Instead, he was silent. He was finally, simply, guilelessly silent. 

She shook her head. “Go home and molder in your grave with your sweetheart. You’re obviously too ‘good’ for the lot of us. So go back to your heaven and weep until your poor broken hearts burst. As for us - let us enjoy our hell. Lord knows we worked hard to earn it.”

For another minute, there was only silence.

And then Thaddeus said, “ _Cordelia._ ”

“That’s my name,” she replied solemnly. It seemed, for a brief instant, that some sort of long-belated epiphany was about to explode behind those glowing blue eyes hovering across from her. 

That’s precisely when a burst of frantic, high-pitched wailing broke out from the bedroom. 

Cordelia looked back towards the source of the noise and groaned. “Also, congratulations. Now you’ve woken the baby.”

“ ** _Me_** _? You’ve been shouting more than I have_ ,” Thaddeus retorted.

“Hush! That’s enough,” Cordelia said, waving one hand dismissively in Thaddeus’s general direction. Her daughter needed her – Thaddeus, regardless of whatever delusions he might still have been under, didn’t. And Andrew was a hopelessly heavy sleeper these days, it seemed. The whole house could be exploding, and there’d be little chance it’d wake him unless Cordelia shook him back to awareness herself. “The poor girl’s never going to sleep through one night if you keep on with haunting the sitting room at all hours.” 

Not waiting for another reply, she pivoted around and headed towards the other room.

The door to the bedroom was already open, and Cordelia had just walked through it when she heard that dry, sad echo behind her again.

“ _You said you only love monsters,_ ” Thaddeus said quietly. “ _That everyone around you will always be rabble rousers and killers and outcasts. So where does that leave your daughter?”_

Cordelia walked back into the frame of the door, cradling a gradually calming Aine in one arm and holding a huge, feathered hat in the other. That was her captain’s hat – the one that went through all the messiness of London with her and that she was still proud to wear. She smiled warmly at her daughter and fixed the hat upon her gloriously unkempt midnight hair. 

“Free, I hope,” she said. She looked Thaddeus perfectly in the eye this time. “Very much loved, and very much free.”

With a grin, she slammed the door in the dead man’s face.


End file.
